Renovation

[ask_nicely]

Adana gets to work. She starts off with less in the way of money than she'd prefer, due to laws about summoning and counterfeiting, but she has a demon bodyguard who can make just about anything. When given something so obvious to work from, she will exploit it as much as possible.

She offers her services to every lunar colony that will give her the time of day. Most of them accept. Cam is instrumental in most of what she does, but Adana summons a few angels to help integrate shiny new things with the older structures in place. The two angels that Cam meets are nice to Adana, but less so to him - he gets the cold shoulder and some pointed glares and insinuations, but nothing else comes of it besides that. Adana keeps the peace as well as she can, distracts all parties involved with things to do, and they carry on without any real incident.

While fixing things is something that she's happy to do, she wants things to be organized in such a way that they don't need her to keep functioning. She has Cam make several factories, specialized in maintenance materials. Then she sells the rights to use them to companies that she background checks as 'not idiots.' She undercuts what it would cost to have them built normally, accepts several commissions to make other factories for things like shuttles and polymer repair gel, and has Cam build those, too. Along with those, miniature black holes are created and sold, to give gravity to space stations and the like. Soon enough, she is rich.

Once she has money to play with it, she starts using it. She bribes several companies into making deals with one another, hires more staff to do her bidding, and then slowly expands. Disaster relief structures are made, funded by her business in services such as extranet ports and factories. She negotiates the disaster relief's neutrality to international laws, and then they get to helping lunar colonies that are having problems.

Meanwhile, she negotiates with Mars and its colonies to set up terraforming. It's slow going, there are a lot of separately governed colonies to get to play nice together, but she makes steady progress. They should be good for terraforming the planet within a year. She realizes that she could just grab Cam and go do it whenever she likes, with or without permission, but she isn't anonymous anymore.

She becomes known as a demon summoner. A very effective demon summoner. Soon it's common for people to look at her nervously when she walks into a room. She doesn't care, except to behave extremely nicely, and play nice with all laws that she can. No need to make people afraid of her or Cam, she's got time to be patient.

True to her word, the binding on Cam is loose and pretty flexible. She doesn't stop being nice to him or treating him like a person just because he is working for her. Actually, if anything, she's nicer - cheerier, happier, thanking him every time he makes her something useful. And there's usually something useful to make, too, because she's always doing something or working on various projects that are all leading towards one goal - make the solar community as nice a place to live as possible.

Comments

[ask_nicely]

She smiles, and snuggles him. "And you mean more to me than your secondary purposes, too."

[from_scratch]

"Good."

[ask_nicely]

Snuggle, snuggle.

"I think I might like having wings, after I'm angelified. I could snuggle you back with them."

[from_scratch]

"I could make you a set right now, you know, although if you ever wanted rid of them you'd want an angel to do the patch job on the ex-joints. And it would get you odd looks."

[ask_nicely]

She giggles. "Tempting, but it would be a bad idea to be mistaken for a daeva. If I were with you, someone could think we were both rogue and then react like I was invincible. Which would end badly. I'll just be patient."

[from_scratch]

Nuzzle. "I will do my best to get in the way of anyone who attacks you, but I have no supernatural senses and no supernatural reaction time."

[ask_nicely]

"I know. My method is less 'be impregnable' and more 'be the type of person people do not want to attack' but, as you saw with killswitch lady, that's not always perfect."

[from_scratch]

"Yeah, I did see that."

[ask_nicely]

Snuggle. "Hey, I've got you, you can make up the difference pretty well."

[from_scratch]

"What wound up happening to her, anyway?"

[ask_nicely]

"She's in jail, the trial went exceedingly fast because I gave them part of my comm log. Kind of conclusive proof, considering."

[from_scratch]

"I bet her first step would have been to get you to make an angel doctor the logs."

He is now wrapped around her in a distinctly protective manner.

[ask_nicely]

"Most likely, yes," she agrees. "There was a bit of an argument about if I'd gotten an angel to doctor it myself, actually. That was about the only thing that kept them from immediately saying, 'Yup, guilty.' I think she also tried to argue that you'd made the killswitch, but everybody knows that you don't unbind demons." She winks. "So how could you have possibly managed that?"

[from_scratch]

Cam laughs into her hair.

[ask_nicely]

She giggles. "I'm very glad she's in jail."

[from_scratch]

"It's a good place for her. Why didn't she just learn to summon her own damn demons?"

[ask_nicely]

"... Honestly? So she wouldn't have had to pay the price for them, I think. She'd make someone else do it. Which means that if she'd succeeded..." Wince.

[from_scratch]

Yep, this is a protective demon Adana is wrapped in.

[ask_nicely]

Snuggle, snuggle. "I'm all right," she murmurs to him. "Thank you so much for saving me."

[from_scratch]

"You're welcome." Pause. "What would you have done if I had killed her? Killing people started seeming a lot less off-limits when I learned about Limbo."

[ask_nicely]

"I would have been upset with you and extremely worried that you were about to go on a killing spree. Now that I know about Limbo it's less... Off limits, but I still don't like it."

[from_scratch]

"Yeah, I don't like it either, but - what I didn't like about death before was that I thought people ended. Permanently unsalvageable streams of consciousness. And now I know they don't. Killing people now mostly seems highly impolite and reputationally unwise."

[ask_nicely]

"Right. That's essentially my logic on the matter. I am having trouble imagining a situation where I would willingly destroy people that utterly, honestly. Send them to Limbo, maybe, if I had no other option, but actually ending people I don't think I'm capable of. It's more likely that I'd just - lock them up, make sure they have basic necessities, throw away the key and then ignore them."

[from_scratch]

"I think people who are purposefully living at the expense of other people living are excellent targets if you can't talk them down and don't have the wherewithal to lock them up, personally. But I haven't killed anybody myself, let alone destroyed them."

[ask_nicely]

Adana shrugs. "Maybe. It's such a situation that I don't see myself being in that it's kind of alien to me. I can always figure out a way to lock someone up if given time and access to daevas. If those weren't options I honestly don't know what I would do."